It's now time to get our hands dirty and start developing a Rails application. In Chapter 2, we saw the data structure for the Intranet application, which Acme plans to build. In this chapter, we'll start building this application: in effect, we will be looking over Rory's shoulder as he develops Intranet. For the purposes of this chapter, Linux will be used as the development platform; but as all of the tools used are cross-platform, the instructions should port easily to Windows and Mac. Specifically, we'll focus on turning the abstract data structure for Intranet into a Rails application. This requires a variety of concepts and tools, namely:

• The structure of a Rails application.
• Initializing an application using the rails command.
• Associating Rails with a database.
• The built-in utility scripts included with each application.
• Using migrations to maintain a database.
• Building models and validating them.
• Using the Rails console to manually test models.
• Automated testing of models using Test::Unit.
• Hosting a project in a Subversion repository.
• Importing data into the application using scripts.

You may have noticed that we haven't mentioned much about the application's user interface. That's because we can build a large part of the application without having to code HTML. We'll see how to add a front-end in the next chapter, but for now we will concentrate on the data side of things.

Chapter 4: Working with Rails The World According to Rails Model-View-Controller Architecture Convention over Configuration Rails and MVC Setting Up a New Rails Application Using Mongrel to Serve Your Application Connecting Rails to a Database Creating a Database and System Account Setting Up a Database Connection Configuring the Rails Environments Testing the Database Connection Troubleshooting a MySQL Connection ActiveRecord, Migrations, and Models Model == Table Which Comes First: The Model or The Table? Building a Model with Migrations Converting a Data Structure into a Migration Defining Columns in Migrations Other Operations Available in a Migration Running a Migration Rolling Back to a Previous Version of the Database The Scaffold Completing the Database The companies Table The addresses Table Generating the Remaining Tables Models in Detail Creating New Records in a Table via Models Finders Finding All of the Records in a Table Virtual Attributes Sorting Records Finding a Single Record Finding Records Matching Search Criteria Finding Records Using Attribute-Based Finders Finding Records by Raw SQL Writing a Custom Finder Viewing the SQL Viewing Logs in Eclipse Validation Validating People Validating Companies Validating Addresses Other Types of Validation Testing Setting Up for Testing Anatomy of a Test Case What Should be Tested? Fixtures Tests for the Person Model Other Types of Assertion Becoming Driven by Testing Associations between Models Parent to children (one-to-many): addresses to people Parent to child (one-to-one): addresses to companies Parent to children (one-to-many): companies to people Many-to-many relationships Dependencies Testing Associations Putting the Project into Context Storing a Project in Subversion Ignoring Temporary Files Committing Code to the Repository Processing Data Exporting the Data from Outlook Mapping a Text File to Database Tables Coding the Script Summary

Paperback 528 pages Released: October 2007 ISBN: 1847190855 ISBN 13: 978-1-847190-85-7

View the book details on PacktPub.com